Secretary of State John Kerry; Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations envoy on the Syria issue; and Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia in Geneva on Friday.Credit
Pool photo by Larry Downing

GENEVA — Secretary of State John Kerry planned to meet Friday evening with his Russian counterpart, as the two sides sought to forge an agreement on how to disarm Syria’s chemical weapons program.

Mr. Kerry and Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, held a working lunch earlier on the chemical weapons issue. Their teams of arms controls officials also conferred. In the morning, Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lavrov had a three-way meeting with Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations envoy, on the parallel issue of how to arrange a peace conference to facilitate a political settlement.

“President Obama is deeply committed to a negotiated solution with respect to Syria,” Mr. Kerry told a joint news conference at which he said the three diplomats would continue their discussions around Sept. 28 in New York.

But prospects for peace talks, he said, would depend heavily on the outcome of the efforts to put Syria’s chemical weapons under international control and eventually destroy them.

“We both agreed to do that homework and meet again in New York around the time of the U.N. General Assembly in order to see if it is possible then to find a date for that conference, much of which will obviously depend on the capacity to have success here in the next days″ on the subject of the chemical weapons, Mr. Kerry said. It was not clear if their Geneva meetings would wrap up Friday or continue into Saturday.

As the deliberations went on, Kofi Annan, the former United Nations Secretary General and prior Syrian envoy, also conferred separately with Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lavrov.

“These are fast-moving developments,” said Mr. Annan. “And I hope we are going to see further movement on the issue.”

“Hopefully at the end of the day we will come up with a proposal that deals effectively with the chemical weapons, gets people back to the table to seek political settlement and improve the humanitarian condition for the people of Syria.”

The State Department announced that Mr. Kerry would also be traveling to Jerusalem on Sunday to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. Mr. Kerry met recently in London with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, and one purpose of his meeting in Israel is to discuss the Middle East peace talks.

But Jen Psaki, the spokesman for the State Department, said the meeting with Mr. Netanyahu would also focus on developments in Syria.

Mr. Kerry has argued strongly in recent weeks that it was necessary to carry out a military strike in Syria after the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack near Damascus to reinforce the message to Iran that the Obama administration would not allow the Iranians to field a nuclear device and was retaining a military option as a last resort.

After Jerusalem, Mr. Kerry plans meet on Monday in Paris with Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, and William Hague, the British foreign secretary. The Monday meeting was first reported by Agence France-Presse and was confirmed by an American official.

That would provide Mr. Kerry with an opportunity to confer with the United States’ two principal European allies on the Syria crisis, each of whom is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.

While in Paris, Mr. Kerry will also meet with Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal. Saudi Arabia has been a strong supporter of the Syrian opposition and advocate of taking tough action following the August 21 chemical weapons attack.

Mr. Obama’s decision to defer military action, however, has stirred concern in Israel that the credibility of the American policy toward Iran is being eroded.

Mr. Kerry was not the only one here who spoke publicly on Friday about the possibility of holding peace talks on Syria.

Sitting on a dais with Mr. Kerry, Mr. Lavrov hailed effort of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, to persuade President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to join the treaty banning chemical arms, and stressed the need to resume peace talks in Geneva.

Mr. Lavrov said it was “very unfortunate that for a long time the Geneva communiqué was basically abandoned,” referring to a 2012 document that outlined basic terms for the peace talks.

Despite the public facade of unity, however, the United States and Russia have been sharply divided over how to organize a political settlement and who should attend a peace conference.

After Mr. Kerry flew to Moscow and proposed a peace conference in May, Russia wanted to include Iran, which along with the Kremlin is one of the principal backers and arms suppliers of the Assad government.

The United States has opposed including Iran and has argued instead for including the “London 11,” a group of European and Arab nations that have been supporting the Syrian resistance. But that has been rejected by Moscow.

Anothercomplication is the unlikeliness of the Syrian opposition’s agreeing to attend. Syrian rebel leaders are bitter about Mr. Obama’s decision to put off military action and explore a disarmament plan with the Russians.

In a recent statement, Gen. Salim Idris, the head of the military wing of the Syrian opposition, rejected the Russian initiative and said the Syrians who carried out the Aug. 21 chemical attack near Damascus that started the current crisis must be punished.

In an effort to address their fears, Mr. Kerry spoke Thursday with General Idris and Ahmad al-Jarba, the president of the Syrian opposition, and sought to assure them that the military option remained on the table and that the Obama administration would insist that any understanding about Syria’s chemical weapons be verifiable and enforceable, a State Department official said.

But it remained to be seen whether Mr. Kerry made any headway in calming the opposition’s anxieties.

Video

Kerry's Statement on Syria

Secretary of State John Kerry speaks about the situation in Syria from Geneva, Switzerland, where he is meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov.

Mr. Kerry said that the talks he had conducted with Mr. Lavrov on Thursday had been “constructive.”

There was no way, however, to tell if the United States and Russia had made substantial progress on what Mr. Kerry had previously called the “exceedingly difficult” task of developing a credible plan to secure and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons stocks.

Mr. Putin continued to bask in his unaccustomed role of a potential peacemaker, asserting that Syria’s declaration of intent to join the international treaty banning chemical weapons was an important step that would lead to a peaceful resolution of the crisis.

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“I think that we should welcome this decision by the Syrian leadership,” Mr. Putin said in Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek. “And I want to express my hope that this will be a very serious step on the path toward a resolution of the Syrian crisis. This confirms the serious intentions of our Syrian partners to go on this path.”

Mr. Putin spoke at a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, where other leaders expressed support for Russia’s diplomatic effort, which was aimed at averting an American-led retaliatory strike following the alleged use of chemical weapons in an attack near Damascus last month.

The organization is a political and economic alliance that includes Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Mr. Putin said his counterparts all agreed that any military intervention was “unacceptable without the approval of the United Nations Security Council,” where Russia and China have veto power.

Despite Mr. Putin’s statement, it is far from clear that Mr. Assad’s move will ease the crisis because American officials remain skeptical that Mr. Assad will take concrete steps in the near future to put his arsenal under international control and agree to arrangements to dispose of it.

Earlier Thursday, Mr. Assad announced publicly that his country had formally applied to join the chemical weapons treaty. According to the treaty’s terms, Syria would be required to submit a declaration detailing the types, quantities and locations of all its chemical weapons and the locations of all facilities for producing them within 60 days of formally joining the accord.

But Mr. Kerry said that the normal procedures were far too slow because Mr. Assad’s government had used chemical weapons against its own people.

“There is nothing standard about this process because of the way the regime has behaved,” Mr. Kerry said. “The words of the Syrian regime in our judgment are simply not enough.”

A spokeswoman for the United States Mission to the United Nations made a similar point in a statement.

“Syria needs to take immediate actions to disclose, surrender and eliminate its chemical weapons stockpile under international monitoring and verification,” said the spokeswoman, Erin Pelton. “Statements without action are wholly insufficient for a country that has had a secret, enormous chemical weapons program for decades.”

Mr. Kerry emphasized that “only the credible threat of force” had prompted Mr. Assad to acknowledge that his nation possessed chemical weapons in the first place, and that a military option was needed to ensure that Mr. Assad fulfilled his promises.

At the end of their presentations, Mr. Lavrov seemed surprised by the length and tone of Mr. Kerry’s statement. “I’m not prepared with the extended political statement,” Mr. Lavrov said. “Diplomacy likes silence.”

At the end of their joint appearance, Mr. Kerry noted that he had not heard some of Mr. Lavrov’s remarks, which had been translated, and asked that the interpreter repeat them.

Turning to Mr. Kerry, Mr. Lavrov, who has a long rapport with his American counterpart, joked in English that was not necessary. “Don’t worry,” he said.

“You want me to take your word for it?” Mr. Kerry said with a smile. “It is a little early for that.”

Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lavrov met at the same Geneva hotel where Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the secretary of state, presented Mr. Lavrov with a red “reset” button in 2009 to symbolize the Obama administration’s efforts to improve ties with Moscow — an effort largely stymied since Vladimir V. Putin resumed his role as Russia’s president.

American officials say they hope Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lavrov can work out an effective plan, but they are wary of the United States being drawn into prolonged talks that would serve as a tactic to delay, and perhaps prevent, an American-led military strike.

One test will be the willingness of Russia and Syria to accept “a rapid beginning to international control” that would preclude the Assad government from gaining access to chemical weapons or using them, said a senior State Department official who was traveling on Mr. Kerry’s plane.

Coming up with a verifiable plan to inspect, control and dispose of Syria’s chemical weapons during a civil war is a daunting task. Though Obama administration officials have said that the problem of Syria’s chemical weapons has been discussed with the Russians for more than a year, the two sides have not talked about it in detail.

For example, the United States and Russia have yet to compare intelligence on the quantities of Syria’s chemical stocks, their main elements and their locations. American officials plan to begin that process here.

“What we will be looking at is the chemical weapons stockpiles, the production facilities, precursor chemicals,” the State Department official said, referring to the goals of the disarmament effort. “And to the extent that there are munitions that are used to spread those chemical weapons in whatever manner, that obviously is part of dismantling and destroying the chemical weapons that Assad has.”

A major concern is how to conduct inspections safely in the middle of a civil war, to make sure that the Assad government is not hiding some of its stockpile.

Gary Samore, the senior aide on nonproliferation issues at the National Security Council during President Obama’s first term, said that the Assad government would be reluctant to give up its entire arsenal because it valued poison gas as a deterrent against Israel and a weapon to attack Syrian rebels.

“What Assad might make is a partial declaration of the chemical weapons he is willing to put under international control and keep a significant portion in his back pocket,” said Mr. Samore, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard.